Friday Philosophy – What Was My Job Again? December 11, 2009

I know I have mentioned this before, but I did not choose to work with Oracle – I fell into it by accident. I found myself in a job which I was no longer enjoying, for a boss who had issues with me and I had issues with a salary (mine, of course). So I decided to apply for a job with a company a friend of mine worked for:

For those of you who are not UK-born or have seen less than three decades go by, in 1990 “Oracle” was a teletext company that provided information on your TV screen for the TV company Channel 4. Basic news, entertainment, sports etc via chunky text and chunkier graphics thrown up in glorious low-res.

I honestly thought I was going for an interview with that company, as opposed to the other “Oracle”, some database company with the same name which went on to pretty much conquer the corporate database and applications world. That was a pretty lucky break for me and I made a conscious decision to stick with this database stuff.

Many years later I was on a contract doing database performance tuning. Someone, a manager, came and asked me about how they could save space, not in the database world but in the Unix filesystem world. So I made the suggestion that they check out the man page on compress. We compressed some big files and he went away happy, leaving me to get on with my database stuff. My big mistake was, when he came back a week later and asked how he could get the compressed data out, I promptly showed him. I revealed too much knowledge.

I came in to work the next Monday morning and my desk had gone. There was an oblong square of dust and hula-hoop crumbs, nothing else. Even my pile of “documents to get back to” from under the desk was gone. Had I been sacked? No, I had been put in the Unix system administration team. My desk had been picked up and physically moved across the room to the Unix Corral, along with everthing on, under or next to it.

No one has asked me, it had not been mentioned to me at all, the managers had just realised on Friday that half the existing team (contractors) had left at the end of the week and no replacements had been found. That devious manager I had helped had told the others I was a whizz at Unix and so my fate was sealed. I was not a whizz at Unix, I was barely competent at basic shell programming. But I learnt a bit before deciding I wanted to stick at the Database stuff and went off to a contract doing that again. I still kind of wish I’d done the Unix a little longer though.

The final shift I’ll mention, and is probably more commonly echoed in other people’s experience, is coming in one day to find you are a manager. This had happened to me small-scale a couple of times, taking on a contract where I ended up in charge of a team, but in this particular case I was a permanent employee managing a team of 4 DBAs and my boss left. Within the week I found that I was being treated as the manager of 5 or 6 teams, totalling about 30 people. More by them than by upper management, but upper management cottoned on and asked me to do the job. Long story cut short, I resisted the move upwards but it happened anyway. Not, at that time, what I wanted at all.

I’ve told the above story a few times when doing presentations on management-related topics and many people, a surprising number to me, have said to me afterwards that the same sort of thing happened to them. I am also now chair of the Management and Infrastructure Special Interest Group of the UK Oracle user group. That SIG is full of people with a similar story.

What is the point of this particular Friday Philosophy? Well, these experiences have made me realise that a lot of people are probably doing jobs they just found themselves in, or in the case of managers, just got pushed into.

If you did not chose your job, you are unlikely to be a good fit, especially to start with.

I’m sure most of us have experienced this and, looking back, can see that initially we lacked the skills, the background, even the inclination for the role. But we either got on, moved on, or become morose and bitter.

This also means that we are all probably encountering a lot of people in that exact situation, all the time – People doing a job they just found themselves in. So, if someone seems to not be doing a job as well as they could, check how long they have been doing it. If it is a recent change, remember your own experience and cut them some slack. You would have appreciated it when you were them.

It also explains Morose and Bitter Geoff who manages Accounts too, doesn’t it?